Death in Transit

By JERRY SOHL

Illustrated by EMSH

There was one, and only one, thing Clifton could do. Even so, he made the worst of 100 possible choices!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity Science Fiction, June 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Clifton stood at the bottom of the shaft, his face white, his eyes wide, his stance against the bulkhead that of a man who needed only a slight push to slump to the floor.

"Karen," he murmured. "Karen."

He had been standing there a long time.

He was staring at his dead wife, a heap of broken bones and blood on the floor. But he was not seeing her—at least not as she was now. He was seeing her the way his mind kept bringing her back to him: the white evenness of her teeth when she smiled, the fury of her bright blue eyes when she was angry, the way she had uncomplainingly slept on the wrinkled sheets of the bed he had made when she had been ill ten years before, and the way they had laughed about that when she reminded him of it years later. He moved to stand erect, wondering why he should have thought about that at a time like this, and then, as he looked at her again and saw what the fall had done to her, he clenched his hands in anger.

They had said it couldn't happen! But they had been wrong. Man's wisdom was not infinite after all. All the man-years of thought, all the endless whirring and clicking of the computers and calculators—all of it had not taken into account what might happen to Karen.

His hands fell open. He knew that actually, they had never been wrong. If he had found her right away, he could have put her back together. He could have utilized the synthesizer for anything really bad, like a shattered bone. The needles of the organic analyzer would have told him what else he had to do.

But Karen had been dead for hours when he found her. Too long. The damage was irreparable, permanent. She was beyond recall. He might conceivably have animated her muscles, her glands, got her blood to flowing again. But her brain would have remained a vacuous, inert thing. You had to 

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